Skepticism

EVENTS

The slut was just asking for it

Look at her, exposing all that skin and smiling enticingly, tempting every man she meets.

About a year ago, her father, Fayhan Ghamdi, had concerns about her virginity — are you surprised? Look at her! — and brought her in for a medical examination. I guess she didn’t pass to his satisfaction, because he took her home and beat her.

The man, said to be a religious scholar who is also a regular guest on Islamic television networks, confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries, activists from the group Women to Drive said in a statement on Saturday.

Lamia was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011, with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns, the activists said.

Also,”she had been raped ‘everywhere'” — it’s reported that her “rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed” (horrific injury whited out; select it if you must see it, otherwise…not for the sensitive). All this was done by her devout father who was concerned about her purity.

The father was arrested. (“I should hope so!” is what you’re thinking.)

Lama, the little girl, died of her injuries about 10 months later.

This was in Saudi Arabia, where they have laws that “a father cannot be executed for murdering his children, nor can husbands be executed for murdering their wives”. So the death penalty was off the table, which is a good thing as far as I’m concerned, and I just wish it were an expression of humanity rather than a special exception for men, with women otherwise getting their heads chopped off for lesser offenses.

Unfortunately, a month after the child died and less than a year after the brutal beating and torture that led to her death…

The judge ruled that the “blood money and the time the defendant had served in prison since Lama’s death suffices as punishment,” activists reported.

She was five years old. He got less than a year in prison for her torture-rape-murder.

Comments

I try really hard not to fall into the rampant Islamaphobia that seems to be de riguer these days, but stories like this make me wish the entire Arabian peninsula was transformed into radioactive glass.

We can never be pure or stainless enough to satisfy the creator who made us. That we came to exist at all is an undeserved mercy. Only lower can come from what is higher. As in heaven, so on earth; as on earth, so in heaven.

If the child rape is a reason to destroy an entire peninsula, Italy would be fucked.

But it isn’t a reason. There are men and women, boys and girls, living there who are also the victims of this religion. Just like nearly every other part of the planet. This guy is a real… I don’t even have a word to describe how vile he is. But his crimes are his crimes. The sickening part is that he is protected by his religion, and the enshrined misogyny in that country. Those problems don’t just exist in the Arabic world.

I get the enraged response. But no country should be nuked into oblivion because entitled assholes are protected by the social norms and the religion shared.

Saudi Arabia has special leniency for men murdering family members, but the culture of violence is everywhere. Wherever men are taught that they have ownership over wives and children, this can be justified.

Those are just the first three examples I found after googling for “father beats daughter to death.” Full disclosure: I had to sift through the many, many stories about the Texas father who beat his daughter’s molester to death. That, too, fits the theme, though. Violence as a result of ownership.

like mellowmonkey, I went looking for more incidences and I now feel sick.

I am involved in education, and have recently been up close and personal with muslim control over girls – and been told that there is nothing that can be done, but this is – I can’t even put it into words.

I don’t know what we can do, other than keep talking about the problem. I know I can’t directly intervene when people poison their children with the horrible messages born from their faiths. I can only hope that our efforts make these children, and maybe even their parents, see how horribly toxic the underlying beliefs normalized by their religion.

But it isn’t just religion, there’s horrible sexist attitudes that help protect abusive fucks. This guy, this particular example, is outrageous in terms of his crimes and his subsequent punishment.

I don’t know that it’s even religion. An acquaintance of mine was recently convicted of abuse of a small child. No religious excuse, he just did it because he could. Religion may make it worse by making people like that feel justified, but would no religion be any better? Plenty of misogynist atheists out there.

I had to sift through the many, many stories about the Texas father who beat his daughter’s molester to death. That, too, fits the theme, though. Violence as a result of ownership.

I don’t see how violence in reaction to the assault of a loved one is inherently indicative of a sense of ownership. After all, there are people in this thread fantasizing over the nuclear annihilation of an entire country because of the injustice done to a girl they never even knew existed, much less felt a sense of ownership over.

I had to sift through the many, many stories about the Texas father who beat his daughter’s molester to death. That, too, fits the theme, though. Violence as a result of ownership.

I agree with Lindwurm on this one. The violence may be as a result of perceived ownership, but there are other possible reasons for it as well. When I hit adolescence, my (Texas) relatives started “joking” that they’d kill an abusive boyfriend for me, but, of course, if I preferred to do the job myself they’d stay out of the way. I took that as a statement of “you don’t have to put up with crap, we’re here to back you up” rather than a statement of “no one else is messing with our property”.

That having been said, there’s a lot of implicit and explicit sexism in the US and particularly in Texas and not a lot of help for women who are stuck in abusive relationships if their relatives aren’t willing to back them up. It’s not like there are a lot of domestic violence shelters in rural west Texas. Or even a lot of police to call if someone’s started playing with their guns a bit more than seems healthy…

Lindwurm, if this story took place in the American midwest and a judge let the father off this lightly–yes, it could happen, easily–would there be many people here calling for the blood of all midwesterners and saying that the center of North America should be reduced to glass? There is something else going on there beyond the specific sense of ownership over a child, but it’s not something good.

A Middle Eastern man kills his daughter–or another man for violating his daughter–and it gets treated as an “honor killing.” If a westerner does it, it’s viewed differently. That doesn’t change the fact that, yes, it is coming from a sense of ownership.

It takes a reduction of other people to objects and property to justify murderous vengeance. The death penalty does this. War does this. All of this is about treating people as things. The horrific things this man did don’t reduce him to an object that anyone has a right to destroy. He is a human being, as are all of his many, many innocent neighbors who would be killed by a nuclear assault or drone strike or whatever other revenge fantasy someone wants to wallow in.

If you think you have a right to reduce another human being to meat, then yes, you’re reducing that person to an object that can be destroyed as you see fit. AKA property.

Oh, that poor baby girl. This is easily the most horrifying thing I’ve read all week.

Accusations of Islamophobia are indeed irrelevant. Mellowmonkey is more right than s/he knows: this horror has happened here, countless times, and it is very likely going on right now. Are any of you aware of this article on sexual abuse among the Amish? Victims are regularly pressured by their religious leaders to forgive their attackers when they ask forgiveness (and I’m sure the vast majority of these sexual predators experience remorse only that they got caught). God forbid anyone should notify the state or federal authorities (literally, actually): that would result in expulsion from the community. And, of course, it’s always the women and the girls who suffer.

Note that the article was published in 2005, although I haven’t seen anything since suggesting that the investigation rate has improved. Every once in a while Amish leaders in Ohio or Pennsylvania do turn over a rapist to the police, but I suspect it’s probably simply an attempt at PR, and the problem continues unabated.

I had to go away and calm down before commenting on this. I’ve read this story before on Avicenna’s blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across a story that has quite the capacity to disgust, sadden and infuriate me all at the same time. Every time I read it my faith in humanity dies a little.

A couple of points:

– Concerned about her virginity? She was five!
– I have long said that Saudi Arabia is a massive shithole, and I am hugely ashamed of my country for being their allies. We’re always calling out other countries for their human rights record, but Saudi Arabia, which has a worse record than most, is A-OK because oil.
– Blood money is paid to the victim’s family… but he’s her father, so who did he pay?
– She was 5 years old and it took her 10 months to die. And he got a year. That judge is an arsehole.

A Middle Eastern man kills his daughter–or another man for violating his daughter–and it gets treated as an “honor killing.” If a westerner does it, it’s viewed differently. That doesn’t change the fact that, yes, it is coming from a sense of ownership.

I disagree. I don’t have a daughter but I have a little sister, and if anyone molested her I would have great difficulty restraining myself from marching round to the abuser’s house and beating seven shades of shit out of them. Thankfully it’s never happened, the closest I’ve come is thumping some bloke for calling her a slut (because her and her friend danced with him and his mate and then walked away when they tried for a kiss. Real slutty /snark).

This is not because I think I own her, but because I love her and no one has the right to treat her that way, so anyone treating her that way would infuriate me. I imagine his feelings regarding his daughter were very similar. Protection is not the same as ownership.

I disagree. I don’t have a daughter but I have a little sister, and if anyone molested her I would have great difficulty restraining myself from marching round to the abuser’s house and beating seven shades of shit out of them.

Let me try to explain this more plainly:

If you want to hurt someone against their will, you are taking away their bodily autonomy. You are mentally assigning yourself the right to do so, as if you had ownership of their body instead of them having ownership of their own.

We all have the capacity to do this. We all have little fantasies about hurting people who have hurt us. We can justify it–they hurt us or someone we love–but what we are justifying is taking away someone else’s bodily autonomy.

I’m including myself in this “we”. This is part of society. I’m not saying everybody who wants to punch someone for hurting a loved one is morally identical to the father who beat and raped his daughter to death. But the same psychological process that allows us to take away someone’s bodily autonomy in one context is the what’s being used to take it away in another context. To you, hurting your little sister is a justifiable reason for someone’s bodily autonomy to be taken away. To the man in the OP, whatever ideas he had about his daughter were his justification.

Oh I see! You are claiming ownership of the person you hurt! I’m sorry, I completely misunderstood, I thought you were saying that wanting to hurt her abuser meant you were claiming ownership of whatever female relative you happened to be protecting. My bad.

In that case I agree with you. While I freely admit that my reaction to my sister being mistreated would almost certainly be a violent one, directed at her abuser, I don’t think that it’s a very good reaction. Would I feel justified in doing it? At the time, certainly, and even afterwards there’d be a bit of me saying “he damn well deserved it”, but another bit of me would be a bit ashamed of my lack of control.

It’s a bit of an internal struggle; on the one hand my self control and on the other my temper, the feeling that he deserves it and what I see as my responsibility to protect my loved ones.

bradleybetts, a few years back a man sexually assaulted me and tried to kill me. I fought back, prepared to kill him in my own defense. Once he curled up in the fetal position, I fled instead of continuing to hit him. For a long, long time, I felt bad…because I didn’t kill him when I had the chance. O_O

Lindwurm, if this story took place in the American midwest and a judge let the father off this lightly–yes, it could happen, easily–would there be many people here calling for the blood of all midwesterners and saying that the center of North America should be reduced to glass?

You’re exactly right. We tend to overlook the fact that there is a continuous stream of cases right in this country that are similarly unjust and similarly illustrate that rape culture exists in every country and every institution on this planet.

In California, a man’s rape conviction was overturned because the woman he raped when he pretended to be her boyfriend and crawled into bed with her while she was sleeping was not married, and there is a little known California state law that holds that there is no “rape by fraud” against unmarried women. In New York, a police officer dragged a schoolteacher off the street, held a gun to her head, and forcibly sodomized her, telling a witness who called down from a window to “let him finish.” The first trial ended in a hung jury because two jurors could not believe that this woman could accurately remember if she’d been penetrated when she could not remember the color of the car across the street where she was attacked — and also New York law does not consider forcible anal and oral sex to be rape.

Those are just two cases that I can recall off the top of my head. Ultimately the second jury did the right thing and convicted the bastard in the second case. But when a case that is so clearly the “realest” kind of “real” rape there is doesn’t even end up in a conviction the first time around, that tells us something about the state of our own country in how it deals with rape as a crime.

I’m not trying to be a moral relativist here. I’m saying this is a worldwide problem and is not unique to any particular race, nationality, or religion.

That’s terrible :-/ I hope it’s not patronising of me to offer my sympathy, I just have nothing better.

I get what you’re saying though. I’m not a violent guy by nature, but this guy… when my sister and her friend walked off he went after them, grabbed my sister’s friend’s arm and got in her face. I could see my sister tried to intervene and got a mouthful. I arrived at full speed and got in between them, and told him to calm down. He asked what business it was of mine, I said that’s my sister, he said “Your sister is a slut”… so I headbutted him in the nose.

His mates picked him up, my sister pulled me away. At first you feel justified because he’s such an arsehole, then you get angry all over again and wonder why you didn’t go further because God knows he desereved it. “I should have gone further, you have to protect your sister, he was violent to a woman, I wish I’d killed the bastard”… then you feel bad for wanting to hurt someone and round goes the cycle again.

That was bad enough but your situation was far more extreme. I can’t even imagine what that’s like.

Couple the ability to get caught in a cycle like that and toxic cultural ideas that would help justify horrible crimes against people and things get bad. That’s why awful acts can happen anywhere, and we have to remember that. People are good at justification, and wherever really toxic ideas are floating around it’s always possible someone might justify acting on them.

I really don’t have a lot to add to what MM, Blitzgal, and others have covered. This shit is neverending, and it’s damn near everywhere. The specific excuses the abusers use vary slightly depending, but the actions don’t, not meaningfully.Portia

What on earth could have raised concerns about her virginity?

If I had to guess, I’d say molestation by another family member. I have no proof, but when one member is this steeped in the old misogynistic bullshit, it’s a fair bet that others are too.

I hope this also leads to permanent changes in the Saudi law system instead of just a one-time reaction to public outrage. – Beatrice

Seconded. Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that State Parties must “take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence”. Saudi Arabia (alongside all UN members apart from the USA, Somalia, and South Sudan) is a signatory, although with a reservation “with respect to all such articles as are in conflict with the provisions of Islamic law”.

IMHO, I find sarcastically referring to her as a slut/temptress/whatever very disrespectful. Showing a picture of her and pointing out that she was five is completely sufficient to show the absurdity of her father’s claims. The sarcasm is distasteful icing on an abysmally tragic situation, as though it’s making light of what a nutter her father was. :(

I have all kinds of fantasy punishments in my head for child abusers and people who torture and/or kill animals for the hell of it. Usually they involve visiting the exact same punishment on the monsters who perpetrated the cruelty.

With regard to the father in Texas who killed the child molester, however, it’s worth pointing out that the evidence strongly suggested that he acted on impulse to stop the attack, lost control, and was ultimately horrified by what he had done in the presence of his already-traumatized daughter. It’s hard for me to imagine getting over something like that, and I have nothing but sympathy for him, especially considering all the clueless moronic backslappers singing his praises.

I was going to post one of those Farnsworth “I don’t want…” images, but didn’t know if it would be taken well. I hope the intelligent among us go to the stars rather than the religious zealots that populated some of the Americas.

I expect he was concerned because he knew that he had already removed her virginity and he was concerned about whether others would be able to tell what he had done. Since they could, he vented his rage on her.

He is a human being, as are all of his many, many innocent neighbors who would be killed by a nuclear assault or drone strike or whatever other revenge fantasy someone wants to wallow in.

Oh, but you haven’t heard my revenge fantasy yet. My revenge fantasy is that he should know, really understand without excuse or mental defense, what he has done. And live with that knowledge. Sadly, it’ll never happen. He’ll die believing he did the right thing. And no revenge short of understanding of the evil he has done and repentance is going to be meaningful.

Some further information from the BBC. There is a campaign for legal reform within Saudi Arabia, named “Ana Lama” (I am Lama). The “Ministry of Justice” apparently denies the murderer has been released; perhaps it will become clear whether this is so (or whether, perhaps, he’s been rearrested as a result of the wave of outrage).

I expect he was concerned because he knew that he had already removed her virginity and he was concerned about whether others would be able to tell what he had done. Since they could, he vented his rage on her.

yup, that seems to be the case based on the other related stories I’ve seen.

I was going to post one of those Farnsworth “I don’t want…” images, but didn’t know if it would be taken well. I hope the intelligent among us go to the stars rather than the religious zealots that populated some of the Americas.

You mean the Cult of Huitzilopochtli? :D

And I know what you mean about just wanting to post a Farnsworth picture. I spend a fair bit of time on 4chan as well as FTB (mostly /tg), and I know the value of a good picture. Sometimes, even on FTB, I think “why should I use words when this picture says everything I want to say?”

Can all of the members of Pharyngula get on a rocket, put ourselves in stasis, and go to one of those Earth-like planets a few dozen light-years away? Even the Grand Poopyhead?

seconded, caveat emptor

@mellowmonkey – sorry. Completely inadequate, given what you went through, but I am really bad with words and anything more would probably come across as trite.

As you and others have pointed out, violence against the perpetrators doesn’t solve anything, but that adrenaline-fuelled knee-jerk reaction to physically punish this kind of horror is strong.

People are good at justification, and wherever really toxic ideas are floating around it’s always possible someone might justify acting on them.

Too true.

I now really want to resign from Homo sap. Sudden thought – there is a whole load of bunkum about epigenetics – changingexpression of ‘bad’ genes by positive thinking/eating blueberries/readingpseudoscience books – if it is true, I could think /eat/read drivel myself into a different species!

*eclipsse thinks positive thoughts while eating blueberries*

Nope.

Back to hoping that one day we we will actually deserve our species name.

I have obviously forgotten the appropriate use of the space key in my previous posts – sorry.

OT @mellowmonkey – had completely forgotten about that! I just don’t like the concept of ‘superfoods’ and blueberries were the first thing that came to mind.

Hmmm… Homo sapiens ssp vaccinium-corymbosum not sure that would work – my house only has little cottagey doors and too many stairs. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to operate my digital watch! (sorry, inner geek surfaced again for a second)

@Ichthyic

I am involved in education, and have recently been up close and personal with muslim control over girls – and been told that there is nothing that can be done,

that’s what was said about slavery. this is just another form of it; it will eventually change, and for the same reasons and in likely the same fashion.

General terms – I think you are right (or maybe just hope) – my comment was about my specific recent case, not the wider issue of religious familial control of girls, but I didn’t make that clear in the wording – sorry.

I watched part of the documentary Half the Sky with my sister-in-law. She’s not naive, but she’s new to feminism, and new to some of the issues that women face in different parts of the world.

She had to turn it off partway through, when it got to the part where the girl with one eye told the story of how her “owner” had gouged out her eye, and forced her to take clients as she was bleeding, and how she was rejected by her parents after she was rescued. It was too much for my sister-in-law. She cried and hugged her baby daughter (my niece) very close to her, and said “You are loved. I will always believe you.”

Skatje, I see another justification for the sarcasm. I spoke with a coroner once, and asked him how he coped with things like the deaths of children, their corpses, and so on. He said that the bodies of children recovered from housefires would be referred to as “crispy critters” — because calling them children would be just too hard. Gallows humour distances us from horror.

And that is what I read your father’s sarcasm as. Rather than saying something like, LOOK AT THIS INNOCENT CHILD, RAPED, TORTURED, BURNED, AND MURDERED BY HER MOTHERFUCKING SCUM OF A FATHER, which would be a pretty reasonable angry response, he used sarcasm, distancing himself and his reading just a little bit from the horror of visualizing the tortures the little girl went through.

#47 Skatje & #57 Ichthyic
My take on PZ’s post title was the same as yours, Ichthyic
It was distasteful because the whole concept of men being given the right to verbally and physically abuse, rape and murder ANY FEMALE, of ANY AGE, because she doesn’t meet their standards of purity or proper sexual conduct is more than “distasteful”.
Would calling her a slut (in the angry, ironic sense PZ used it) be less “distasteful” if she were a virgin (and thereby guiltless and pure) if she were 13? 17? 27?

I won’t post my visceral reaction here–it’s too ugly and I’d like to continue to think I’m better than that.
What hurts even worse than the death of an innocent at the hands of what should have been a loving parent is what was this child’s life like? Born into a society where women are chattel. Doubly so, in her case, since she was a child. Unclean. Guilty of the heinous crime of not being born a boy. Undoubtedly, in her father’s mind, destined to grow up and shame her family (i.e. her Father, since only he counts).

Did she ever know love? Was there a moment when her father didn’t look at her with contempt? With shame? With suspicion of who or what she might become or do? Fuckety fuck. I’m going to go listen to Pink’s Fuckin’ Perfect and wish that, at some point in her all-too-brief life, someone thought that about her.

In order to exist, “Purity Culture” HAS to create a virgin/whore, saint/slut dichotomy. Where else do you put the women who fail to meet the “purity” standards? How else do you scare your women into staying pure but to make the consequences for falling off the “purity” bandwagon as ugly as possible? And who else is going to service the menfolk, whose lapses in their own moral standards are overlooked – because “boys will be boys” and “men have needs”?
It’s one reason why those father-daughter purity balls creep me out. It reminds me of the flip side of the coin.

I have no words to adequately describe what an evil arsehole that man is, or how outraged I am that, once again, religion – it happens to be islam, but it could just as easily be christianity in othe parts of the world – is protecting a violent criminal from being brought to justice, and also played a role in creating, reinforcing and excusing the sick mindset that lead to this heinous violence.

It’s one reason why those father-daughter purity balls creep me out. It reminds me of the flip side of the coin.

Holy crap, yes. A girl growing up strictly evangelical has the choice of not staying abstinent (and getting pregnant, and then being held up as an example of Don’t Be That Whore while her lily-white baby gets shipped off to some nice Christian couple who will give it a wretchedly soulless, “Christ-centered life”; or getting married the first time her boyfriend gets antsy, thus forgoing any possible prospect of college and grad school and any hope whatsoever of an interesting life, and likely ending up in a miserable mistake of a marriage–but hey! It’ll all be worth it in the end! She’ll be “intact” on her wedding night! (Assuming she doesn’t go bike or horseback riding in the meantime–then she’ll have some serious explaining to do.)

I remember the first time I was cussed out by the Horde, it was for a similar comment to Artor’s. And I prefaced it by saying I knew it was wrong, and my smoky glass region was smaller (just Mecca), as I recall… But, y’know. Way wrong.

It’s just a natural reaction of angry privilegey types like myself looking at the horrors of the world. Religions sucks supremely, so destroy it with the most supreme act of violence I can imagine. That always works, right?

Someone in another thread said if god existed as described, we’d be morally obligated to try to kill him. I second that, and add that even if he is impossible to kill and defying him brings damnation, it is the responsibility of the moral to embrace damnation and curse that sack of shit all the way down into the fire.

This story isn’t really about religion, so that’s a bit of a sidetrack. Carry on!

Oh, fuck. I selected over the white. And it took her 10 months, 10 godsdamned months, to die from this. Please tell me she was on massive doses of painkillers.

There can be no forgiveness in this world for someone who does this. And I’ve got nothing left even to cry with. Find this scum and lock him away for the rest of his life surrounded by pictures of his baby girl.

How can we influence people in countries like Saudi Arabia to change their views of women? Seems like an impossible effort that only Saudi Arabians can do something about.

Provide support and funding to Saudi Arabian feminist organizations, writers, and activists. Resist Islamaphobia and moral relativism, which silence and can bring harm to those who are citizens of majority Muslim countries and support women’s rights.

Couple the ability to get caught in a cycle like that and toxic cultural ideas that would help justify horrible crimes against people and things get bad. That’s why awful acts can happen anywhere, and we have to remember that. People are good at justification, and wherever really toxic ideas are floating around it’s always possible someone might justify acting on them.

That’s why I count myself lucky every day to live in a (relatively) enlightened 1st-world (I hate that term but but I don’t have a better one) Democracy. We are far from perfect, but the terrible ideas that perpetuate this sort of violence are far from being widespread enough and strong enough to cause this sort of senseless violence. Of course, people will always find other reasons to hurt each other, but at least because the bad ideas aren’t as entrenched any more they don’t get away with it as often. It’s not perfect, but it’s better, and it’s largely because our Governments are more secular.

It’s why stories like this give me such mixed emotions. If I’m having a glass half full day, it’ll be “Sure we’re not perfect, but look what these people have to deal with!”. On a glass half full day, “Even when we sort our own house out there’s still shit loads of work to do”.

Did she ever know love? Was there a moment when her father didn’t look at her with contempt? With shame? With suspicion of who or what she might become or do? Fuckety fuck. I’m going to go listen to Pink’s Fuckin’ Perfect and wish that, at some point in her all-too-brief life, someone thought that about her.

This is the most devastating aspect of it all. This. That she died in excruciating pain, never really having known love, and that now she never will.

I hope someone did, Esteleth, I really do. I hope her mom did love her and and let Lama know that and that it was enough to counter-balance her father’s apparent attitude at least a little. I shall hope.

What can we do? All the stuff The Mellow Monkey said.
AND what PZ is doing. Talk about it. Post it and forward posts to others, including your federal representatives. Tell your friends, many of whom are ignorant that this goes on (like mythbri’s friend).
I realized many years ago that repressive regimes absolutely hate bad PR. The may torture, imprison and kill their own people without a shred of remorse but recoil at having the critical eye of world opinion focused on their actions. The worst part of Timamin Square for the Chinese government wasn’t the uprising. Phfft. Send in tanks. Kill a few rioters. No big deal. It was putting the pictures out to the world and the condemnation they received in response. The North Korean government cares more about putting a positive spin on its regime than the suffering of its people.
So embarrass the hell out of them. I don’t know why this is works to start change, but I have seen it happen over and over again.

How come only guys who talk smack about your sister get a near-beating? How about guys who call other people’s sisters sluts? Or guys who slur girls and women who are only children with no siblings at all? Why don’t all women matter as individual human beings and not just because they’re somebody’s sister?

How come only guys who talk smack about your sister get a near-beating? How about guys who call other people’s sisters sluts? Or guys who slur girls and women who are only children with no siblings at all? Why don’t all women matter as individual human beings and not just because they’re somebody’s sister?

“Imagine if it were your wife/daughter/mother.” Yes, this phrase is almost reflexively brought up when discussing rape, other forms of gendered violence, abortion–really, anything that affects primarily women. But try to picture a woman being call upon to do the inverse: “Imagine if it were your husband/son/father.” It rarely happens. The idea that a woman would need a reminder on how to empathize with someone–as well as way of mentally replacing the object of empathy with someone else who is more personally valued to them–seems slightly ludicrous.

A few days after this all happened, she and I began e-mailing each other. I apologized, again, for the way my friends were acting that night, and much to my dismay, she said: “We’re used to it.” Suddenly, it was different. Rather than a situation involving a group of random men hitting on a group of random women, I now knew one of them. She had a name, and, unlike my friends, she remembered every second of it. She also remembers every other time it has happened to her, every weekend, running errands, and at her gym. The unwanted attention at the latter caused her to join an all-female gym. I was shocked.

IMHO, I find sarcastically referring to her as a slut/temptress/whatever very disrespectful.

It made me uncomfortable, too. : /

It made me very uncomfortable. When I read the article, though, I realized that discomfort was entirely appropriate. And it offers a horrible glimpse into the though processes of an evil man. Sarcasm can open eyes.